Rollbook is a free, web-based film tracker and archival tool I built for analog photographers — a permanent identity layer for every roll of film you shoot. Film records get lost. A roll comes back from the lab, sits in a sleeve, gets boxed, and a year later you're holding a mystery strip with no idea what stock it was, what you rated it at, or where you shot it. Rollbook fixes that by making a roll self-identifying — not for a season, but for decades.
I shoot film, and I got tired of my own records leaking. Notes apps forget, spreadsheets rot, and no cloud service outlives its funding. So I made the record part of the physical negative itself. This is the WHY behind the whole tool: an analog archive should not depend on any single app staying alive.
Log your roll
Everything starts as a private log entry. You record the film stock and the ISO you actually rated it at, the camera and lens, the location, any push or pull, and free-form notes — the whole life of the roll from loading to archiving. It's a proper film photography log, not a scratch pad: every roll gets a stable ID, moves through real statuses as you shoot and develop, and stays completely private to you. Storage is enforced at the database level with row-level security, so your logs are yours alone unless you decide otherwise. If you've been hunting for a film tracker app that handles both 35mm and medium-format organization without treating your data as a product, this is the part that does the daily work.
Two archival anchors that outlast the app
A log in a database is still just a log in a database. What makes Rollbook an archive is that it reaches off the screen and onto the film. When you finish a roll, Rollbook prints two small physical objects that carry the same QR code.
The first is a Frame 0 card — a printed card you photograph as the very first frame on the roll. Develop the negative and the identity is baked into the film strip itself: frame zero is the label. The second is a canister or sleeve sticker carrying that identical QR. One code, two anchors — one on the negative, one on the housing. These are QR codes for film rolls in the most literal sense: two physical things that will still point back to the record long after any website, mine included, is gone. That redundancy is deliberate. Paper and film outlast software, and a roll should be able to identify itself even if you never open the app again.
Share public pages on your terms
Privacy is the default, but you can open a roll up when you want to. Set any roll to unlisted, and anyone who scans its QR code sees a safe, read-only public record — the film stock, the camera, the date. That's it. Your shooting locations and your private notes never leave your account; the public page shows only what's meant to be shared. It's a clean way to let a print's viewer, a lab, or a fellow photographer see the technical story behind a frame without handing over your whole logbook.
Put together, those three pieces — a private film log, two durable physical anchors, and controlled public sharing — are what I mean by a permanent identity layer for analog film. The roll knows what it is. The negative knows what it is. And that knowledge survives the app it was born in.
Rollbook is free and lives at Rollbook. If you shoot film and you're tired of losing the story behind your negatives, load a roll and print a Frame 0 card — that's the whole idea in five minutes. Questions, bugs, or feedback: rollbook@bystanek.com.